How to Optimize a Blog Post for SEO Ranking Ability (On-Page Optimization)

– In this video, I'm gonnashow you how to optimize a blog post for maximum SEO ranking ability.

Now this is going to be achecklist for how to get your on-page SEO dialed incorrectly so that you have a shot of ranking high on the firstpage of organic Google results.

This is not a guarantee ofranking number one, however.

There's a lot that goes intoranking your content high in organic search that we'regonna talk about in this video.

However, what we're focusingour main strategies on here are the on-page things thatyou have a lot of control over.

Now, we're not gonna be divingdeep into how to get guest posts, how to get backlinks, how to share your content and get it to go viral.

Those are things for another day.

Today we're focusingspecifically on the on-page SEO strategies that you need tobe doing in order to even get your content considered torank high in organic search.

So let's do it.

Alright, now let's talk about on-page SEO.

We're gonna be doing this usingan example of one of my most recent blog posts, one that'sbeen doing pretty well despite being published just a coupleof days before actually recording this video.

So it's only been live for two days, although it's alreadyranking on the first page of Google search results.

Now granted, the term bloggingstatistics isn't the most competitive term out there in the world, but there are a few hundredmonthly searches, right? So that is a meaningful numberof people coming to my blog.

Now, let's pop on over to theWP admin behind the scenes for this blog post.

Now this is the WordPresseditor for that exact post we we're just looking at, right? So when you go to all posts, you can navigate tothis post on your blog.

And we're gonna start bytalking about headlines.

What makes a good headlinebecause this is really important for getting your content torank well in organic search.

Now personally, I'm a bigfan of leading with a number.

Especially if it'ssomething that's tutorial, how-to based, right? So how many steps are in your article? Maybe that's, you know, 10steps to accomplishing xyz.

32 blogging statistics, right? Writing a clever headline is something that's very important.

You know, I was just doingsome research on this.

Six out of 10 people reportonly reading a blog article's headline before sharing iton social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, right? So having an important headlineis important in not just getting people to share your content, but getting your content torank well because Google knows that content that ranks wellgets shared the most, right? So this is very important.

I've got a lot of contentabout how to write effective headlines in my blog postabout how to write a blog post.

But the basics of it arethat I recommend leading with a number if you possibly can.

It catches the attentionof your potential readers, people searching on thesearch engines, right? And it's very important toget your keyword phrase, your target keyword phrase invery, very early in the title.

So for me, obviously bloggingstatistics is the keyword phrase I'm going after here.

You can see it boldedin the intro sections of my article here.

I've got it in the first sentence.

That's another important factorto consider for optimizing your blog posts.

Having your keyword phraseideally in the very first sentence of your articleand then bolded if you can.

I'm a big believer in boldingas a signal to the search engines that this is whatyour article's about.

So I've got it in herein the second sentence, and the third sentence, and then you know, variations of it on throughout.

Statistics about blogging, you know, statistics about how to blog, content marketing statistics for bloggers, things like that, right? So it's important to havevariations of your keyword phrase weaved in throughout.

Not just trying to pound itover the head with a thousand mentions of the same keyword phrase.

So switch it up a bit.

Another last note on headlines.

I'm a big fan of parenthesis.

I think it creates kind ofa stopping point visually for people that arescanning a page, you know? Something that'll jumpout at them as being a little bit more unique.

And then naturally, for somethingthat's timely like this, people want relevant information, right? So in 2019.

That's important for me toinclude in this as well.

Now again, this is the on-pageheadline for my article.

Below, we'll talk about the SEO headline.

But first, I wanna reallytouch on the importance of your permalink.

This is the URL that people will navigate.

This is what they're gonnasee in their address bar when they are on your blog post.

This is extremely important.

This is almost as important as a headline.

This tells the search engineswhat your article is about.

So it's very, very crucialthat you include at least your core keyword phrase inthe URL of your blog post.

Now, I'm a big fan ofvery clean, simple URLS.

I'm a minimalist when itcomes to setting permalinks.

So for me, I like keeping itto as few words as possible.

Typically just my core keyword phrase.

And I'll omit thingslike to, or a, or the.

For example, my how tostart a blog article which ranks on the first pageof Google searches as well.

My URL for that is howdash start dash blog.

I think it looks clean, it'ssimple, it's easy to read and digest as a searcher.

And personally, I'm a bigfan of just keeping it clean, and simple, and minimal.

So that's my advice on that front.

Now let's go ahead andjump down to categories.

Categories are very importantfor readers who are gonna be navigating your site.

Now, I'm very careful to categorize posts typically only as one category.

I want it to be very clearwhat this article's about from a site search standpoint.

So this article definitely about blogging.

Gets the check mark.

Under meta tags here.

You know, there's been alot of chatter out there about whether or not meta tagsare even important anymore as an SEO ranking factor.

But, you know, call it superstition, call it just being old school, but I like to includesomewhere between five and 10 meta tags typically.

There's no reason togo super crazy on this.

However, spend, you know, 15, 20 seconds throwing down meta tags that are related toyour core keyword phrase.

So blog statistics, blogging statistics, blogging industry statistics.

These are the kinds of thingsthat people are gonna be searching for and I justwant to keep reinforcing to the search engines that thisis what my article's about.

A featured image here, you know, a quick note on image all tags.

I'm just gonna show you withkind of a random image here.

But important with a featured image to have something that pops.

Visually stands out, right? Because Google sometimesranks their images, or will display images nearthe top of search rankings.

And so having your image upthere as something that pops to potential readers isgoing to make you stand out.

Now, a note on image all tags real quick.

If you go to edit, you'llbe able to see that I've got alternative text here.

And that describes thepurpose of the image.

Now, I'm a very big proponentof trying to make sure that my keyword phrase isincluded in as many of these images as possible in the alternative text for these images.

It's important that youdon't just keyword stuff into every single image.

Sometimes you can get dingedfor trying to game the search algorithms by doing that.

However, for every image onyour blog post that is somewhat related to the target keyword phrase, the topic at hand for the article, I highly recommend including it.

And don't just use the sameimage all text for every image on your site, right? Switch it up.

Now, let's hop down to what ismy favorite WordPress plugin, Yoast SEO.

And this is basically my guideto making sure that each blog post of mine is optimized for on-page SEO before I hit publish.

And I'm gonna show youwhere you can grab Yoast SEO real quick.

This is your WordPress dashboard.

This is where you landwhen you're logged in.

If you click on plugins, here we go.

We go to add new.

And if you search actually under popular, I'm sure Yoast is at the top.

But if you search for Yoast, Y-O-A-S-T, you're gonnasee Yoast SEO near the top.

Now I am due for anupdate here in my plugin.

But what you're gonna seeis an install now button if you haven't yet installedYoast SEO on your site.

So if you don't have Yoast yet, do it.

It's free.

Check this out.

26, 718 reviews.

It's truly an amazing, free product.

I say that not as someone who'saffiliated with them at all.

I earn nothing if you sign up for Yoast.

I just genuinely find it tobe an extremely useful plugin.

So once you get Yoast SEOinstalled onto your blog, you're gonna see thislittle box at the bottom of your blog post now.

You can show and hide this.

This is your snippet preview.

This is what Yoast is tellingyou is most likely to appear as far as your informationabout your blog post in Google searches.

This is a preview they've created, right? So this is your URL.

You can see blogging dash statistics pulling in right there, right? So it's clean, it's simple, it's your keyword phrase.

Your headline.

Now this is actually pretty important.

Sometimes when you writea longer form headline for your on-page headlineof your blog post, it might not fit intosearch engines, right? So your search engine textfor a headline has a maximum number of characters that are allowed.

Now here, you'll notice thatmy SEO title is a little bit different from theon-page title that I have for my blog post.

But I've sort of tweaked it.

It says to blog smarter hereinstead of up above the on-page headline says to improveyour blogging strategy in the parenthesis in 2019, right? So for the SEO version of the title, I've shortened it up a bitwithout losing the purpose of my headline, right? So this is important.

This little green bar willshow you as you get towards the end of your characterlimit, it'll turn red.

So it'll indicate where you need to stop.

And sometimes I found that, you know, maybe search engines will clip your title afew characters short, maybe it'll allow a few more characters than Yoast suggests it will.

There's a little bit of variation here so you can play around with it.

For the slug, I don'trecommend touching this at all.

Control your permalink upabove where we were controlling the URL originally.

Now, the meta description.

By default, if you don'tinput something in the meta description field, Googleand other search engines are going to just pull inthe first couple sentences of written content on your blog post.

Now sometimes thatactually works out okay.

However, if you're not writingyour first few paragraphs with an SEO optimized focus, then you're going to get some content that's not gonna be working for you.

So I recommend writing ameta description, that again, incorporates your targetkeyword phrase right up top, first sentence, gotta do it.

And then, provides just a fewinsights about what this blog post is gonna be about.

Something that's gonna hook the reader.

Someone who's curious aboutclicking on your article, but hasn't done so yet.

So meta description, very important again.

And let's expand thereadability analysis here.

So this is getting into kind of the weeds for most new bloggers.

However, if you're prettyanal about writing, then this is gonna be somethingthat you're gonna like.

So subheading distribution.

Three seconds of my textare longer than 300 words and are not separatedby subheadings, right? So, this is just sort ofreinforcing best practices in terms of how to make yourblog content more easily read by people who come to it, right? Not using words that are too complex.

It does a reading ease test.

It gives you a score ontohow easy your blog post is to read.

It gives you a bunch ofsort of simple guidelines.

Paragraph length, thisis something I will say is very important.

I wanna show you examples here.

If you'll notice, I very rarelygo beyond one or two lines vertically in contentfor my blog post, right? So here's an example of aparagraph that spreads down to the third vertical line.

That's fairly rare for my content.

I'm trying to make contentvery easily read, digestible.

I don't want to scare people away.

And that's very important forincreasing your readability of your blog post.

SEO wise, not a huge contributing factor.

But here in the focus key phrase section, this is where you're goingto type in the target keyword phrase that you wantthis article to ring for.

And below here, you'regonna get a whole bunch of recommendations for howto improve your on-page SEO based on this keyword phrasethat you've got input here.

So this is very important.

You gotta type this in ifyou hope to get actual good optimization tips from the Yoast plugin.

It'll tell you things aboutyour meta description length.

Now I personally think thisis a matter of dispute.

156 characters.

I've seen some of my articlesget much more text listed in the meta descriptions.

It kind of depends, there'sa little variance to this.

But if you go a little bit over, it's better then being under.

Maximize the real estatethat you're going to use.

Image alt attributes.

You know, all of my imagealt tags have my key phrase in them for this post.

And they suggest that that's a bit much.

Now personally, I haven'texperienced a negative impact from showcasing the targetkeyword phrase in my image alt titles pretty heavily.

So personally, as long asI'm not doing it in you know, a 100 images on a singleblog post, I think generally, you're gonna be okay.

Again, there's just eightimages on this blog post.

Key phrase in title.

I've got the key phrasein my title for the SEO, but not at the beginning.

That's not correct.

So sometimes there will be mistakes in the optimization suggestions here.

You can see in the firstsentence of my blog post that I do have the keyphrase blogging statistics right here.

So double check if something looks fishy.

However, there are lots of very, very helpful recommendations.

We don't need to go throughabsolutely everything because the Yoast pluginis going to show you what you should be doing, howto consider changes to make.

Make sure you have outbound links, right? So don't link to competitor content.

I wouldn't wanna link to another article that is specificallyabout blogging statistics from this piece of mindbecause that tells the search engines crawling my articlethat hey, this other article about blogging statisticsis more authoritative because it's linking to itfrom here and it's older.

So, my advice on outbound links, don't link to directlycompetitive content.

And if you must, ifyou absolutely have to, be sure to no follow that link.

Internal links.

Always link internally to related content.

I recommend a minimumof five internal links.

If you can do more, definitely do more.

There's not really muchof an upward limit as long as you're not making yourcontent too overly stuffed with links, right? Key phrase in introduction.

Key phrase length.

Key phrase density.

These are all reallyimportant contributing factors to getting your on-page SEO right.

And this is more of a ratio, right? So my key phrase blogging statistics, it was mentioned 23times out of 2, 000 words.

So having a keyword densityof that sort of ratio is what I'm typically aiming for.

Around one to 2% keyword density.

And that's really it as faras on-page SEO optimizations you should be making.

Again, now that we've gonethrough the tactical components of how to get your on-page SEOright for every single blog post of your site, I wannareiterate that the important factors in actually rankingare the off-page SEO, right? So the things like guestposting to get high authority quality natural backlinksto your articles.

That's gonna be a majorcontributing factor.

Going out and creating a shareableinterest that's optimized for Pinterest, right? Getting a lot of shares on Pinterest.

Another signal to searchengines that your content is highly shareable.

That people are enjoying it.

Getting it somewhat viral onFacebook, on Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever your targetaudience is spending time, that's where you shouldbe sharing your content.

You wanna engage withusers on different types of communities, niche platforms, where your readers are spending time and bring them to your site.

All of these factors inconjunction with getting your on-page SEO right iswhat's going to contribute to being able to rank yourcontent high in organic search.

So good luck.

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